Olive Schreiner's
The Story of an African Farm

Preface

I have to thank cordially the public and my critics for the reception they
have given this little book.

Dealing with a subject that is far removed from the round of English daily
life, it of necessity lacks the charm that hangs about the ideal
representation of familiar things, and its reception has therefore been the
more kindly.

A word of explanation is necessary. Two strangers appear on the scene, and
some have fancied that in the second they have again the first, who returns
in a new guise. Why this should be we cannot tell; unless there is a
feeling that a man should not appear upon the scene, and then disappear,
leaving behind him no more substantial trace than a mere book; that he
should return later on as husband or lover, to fill some more important
part than that of the mere stimulator of thought.

Human life may be painted according to two methods. There is the stage
method. According to that each character is duly marshalled at first, and
ticketed; we know with an immutable certainty that at the right crises each
one will reappear and act his part, and, when the curtain falls, all will
stand before it bowing. There is a sense of satisfaction in this, and of
completeness. But there is another method–the method of the life we all
lead. Here nothing can be prophesied. There is a strange coming and going
of feet. Men appear, act and re-act upon each other, and pass away. When
the crisis comes the man who would fit it does not return. When the
curtain falls no one is ready. When the footlights are brightest they are
blown out; and what the name of the play is no one knows. If there sits a
spectator who knows, he sits so high that the players in the gaslight
cannot hear his breathing. Life may be painted according to either method;
but the methods are different. The canons of criticism that bear upon the
one cut cruelly upon the other.

It has been suggested by a kind critic that he would better have liked the
little book if it had been a history of wild adventure; of cattle driven
into inaccessible kranzes by Bushmen; "of encounters with ravening lions,
and hair-breadth escapes." This could not be. Such works are best written
in Piccadilly or in the Strand: there the gifts of the creative
imagination, untrammelled by contact with any fact, may spread their wings.

But, should one sit down to paint the scenes among which he has grown, he
will find that the facts creep in upon him. Those brilliant phases and
shapes which the imagination sees in far-off lands are not for him to
portray. Sadly he must squeeze the colour from his brush, and dip it into
the gray pigments around him. He must paint what lies before him.

R. Iron.

"We must see the first images which the external world casts upon the dark
mirror of his mind; or must hear the first words which awaken the sleeping
powers of thought, and stand by his earliest efforts, if we would
understand the prejudices, the habits, and the passions that will rule his
life. The entire man is, so to speak, to be found in the cradle of the
child."